The food choice at work study: effectiveness of complex workplace dietary interventions on dietary behaviours and diet-related disease risk - study protocol for a clustered controlled trial

Background: Dietary behaviour interventions have the potential to reduce diet-related disease. Ample opportunity exists to implement these interventions in the workplace. The overall aim is to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of complex dietary interventions focused on environmental dietary modification alone or in combination with nutrition education in large manufacturing workplace settings. Methods/design: A clustered controlled trial involving four large multinational manufacturing workplaces in Cork will be conducted. The complex intervention design has been developed using the Medical Research Council's framework and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines and will be reported using the TREND statement for the transparent reporting of evaluations with non-randomized designs. It will draw on a soft paternalistic 'nudge' theoretical perspective. It will draw on a soft paternalistic "nudge" theoretical perspective. Nutrition education will include three elements: group presentations, individual nutrition consultations and detailed nutrition information. Environmental dietary modification will consist of five elements: (a) restriction of fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt, (b) increase in fibre, fruit and vegetables, (c) price discounts for whole fresh fruit, (d) strategic positioning of healthier alternatives and (e) portion size control. No intervention will be offered in workplace A (control). Workplace B will receive nutrition education. Workplace C will receive nutrition education and environmental dietary modification. Workplace D will receive environmental dietary modification alone. A total of 448 participants aged 18 to 64 years will be selected randomly. All permanent, full-time employees, purchasing at least one main meal in the workplace daily, will be eligible. Changes in dietary behaviours, nutrition knowledge, health status with measurements obtained at baseline and at intervals of 3 to 4 months, 7 to 9 months and 13 to 16 months will be recorded. A process evaluation and cost-effectiveness economic evaluation will be undertaken. Discussion: A 'Food Choice at Work' toolbox (concise teaching kit to replicate the intervention) will be developed to inform and guide future researchers, workplace stakeholders, policy makers and the food industry. Trial registration: Current Controlled Trials, ISRCTN35108237.

Frederick Douglass and Ireland, 1845: The "Vertiginous Twist[s]" of an Irish Encounter

Frederick Douglas was a reader of and writer on the nineteenth-century political and social texts and contexts of oppression, which he experienced at home and witnesed while in Ireland and Britain, 1845-47. This thesis is unique in its identification of several surprising lacunae in the research and critical evaluation of Frederick Douglass’ activities of reading and writing and the texts and contexts that supported these activities. This thesis takes Douglass’ relationship with Ireland and the Irish as its starting point, and offers several moments in the transnational space engendered by Douglass’ readerly and writerly experience of the transatlantic axes of Ireland, Britain and America. This thesis draws upon archival research to recover information regarding Douglass’ trip and subjects his reading and writing on Ireland and the Irish to the critical rigours of narratolgical, cultural and discourse analysis. One lacuna is Douglass’ favourite and neglected school primer, the Columbian Orator, which Douglass signified upon across his autobiographical project. The speech by the Irish patriot and exile, Arthur O’Connor, included in the Orator, is crucial to Douglass’ understanding and expression of justice and equality. Genette’s narratological analysis gives theoretical traction to the ways in which, in his autobiographical representations of his British trip, Douglass recalibrates his autobiographies to reflect his changing perspectives on his life and work. Contrary to popular assumptions, Douglass did, in two letters to Garrison address and comment on Irish poverty. This thesis interrogates the strategic anglophilia of these letters. While the World’s Temperance Convention (WTC) refused to discuss African- American slavery, analysis of Douglass’ speech in Covent Garden and of the paratextual apparatus of the published proceedings of the WTC demonstrates the impossibility of separating these closely interrelated reform causes. When a newly discovered poem from Waterford that admonished the city for its disregard for Douglass’ message is juxtaposed with an uncomfortable moment in Cork, we understand that Douglass became a pawn to bolster sectarian rivalries between nationalist and establishment factions. Though Douglass believed imperial politics was the best vehicle for modernity, he recognised that it had failed Ireland: consequently, in Thoughts and Recollections of a Trip to Ireland (1886), he advocates for Home Rule for Ireland.